Conventionally, various cargoes have been loaded or unloaded by means of various loading means, such as cranes, winches or assembling conveyor means. Suspension type loading means, such as cranes or winches must however be installed on the deck of the vessel and this causes the equipment on the deck to be complicated and, therefore, causes the operation to be troublesome. Loading and unloading the cargoes by use of the assembling conveyor means is ineffective in operation. In addition, the conveyor means, such as roller type or belt type conveyor cannot convey cars which can automatically move. Thus, in case both general cargoes and cars are required to be loaded or unloaded, only conveyor means cannot be used.
In general, each of the multi-storied holds in the vessel is partitioned into a plural of chambers or subholds by partition walls which are required to be uniformly spaced in a limited manner in view of physical strength of the vessel. Thus, the conveyors which are used to transfer the cargoes from the upper to the lower hold of the adjacent holds, are limited in their lengths. This causes the difficulty of the inlet or upper end of the lower conveyor to be connected directly to the outlet end of the upper conveyor, which causes the loading operation to be ineffective.